UK fashion ‘shoppers spend less online’

Fashion retailers in the UK are the most successful at persuading online visitors to buy - both on mobile and desktop - but UK shoppers spend less on each order than the global average, despite their orders including more items on average.

Nosto analysed 1.2 billion visits to fashion e-commerce websites globally, including over 150 million visits to UK sites over the whole of 2018, finding that around 27 per cent less was spent on orders placed via mobile and 32 per cent less on desktop by UK shoppers.

The e-commerce personalisation platform’s data suggested that UK fashion websites have conversions rates of 1.6 per cent on mobile and 2.9 per cent on desktop – higher than corresponding global rates of 1.3 per cent and 2.4 per cent respectively.

However, the UK average order value, which is $75 on mobile and $82 on desktop, is substantially lower than the global average - $103 on mobile and $120 on desktop - despite the UK’s average basket size being slightly higher.

“UK fashion retailers are clearly winning when it comes to converting traffic into sales,” said James White, head of UK and Ireland at Nosto. “One of their big current challenges now is how to encourage shoppers to increase their order values by buying higher value items.”

The report stated that the trend is influenced by general fashion shopping habits and pricing trends across countries, as well as shoppers’ confidence and trust in individual retail brands. It could also be affected by how quickly and easily customers can return items if they don’t meet expectations.

For example French shoppers seem to love using their phones for digital window shopping. They have the longest visit times on mobile - 186 seconds - more than 20 seconds longer than the global average of 164 seconds. The average visit time on desktop in France is 253 seconds, compared with 143 seconds globally.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, consumers appear to be highly committed shoppers, as in when they add something to the online cart, they are more likely than those in any of the other countries analysed to go through with making a purchase. These countries have the lowest cart abandonment rates on both mobile and desktop: 73 per cent and 66 per cent – compared with corresponding global averages of 80 per cent and 74 per cent.

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